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Following the policy of not treating manufacturing as special has led to . . . the US steadily losing manufacturing jobsWe do indeed have fewer manufacturing jobs than we once did...and a lot more output. Mostly, the issue is robots, because I've seen stuff suggesting that China is also losing manufacturing jobs.
Let me change industries, and see what changes:
Following the policy of not treating agriculture as special has let to...the US steadily losing agricultural jobs.Ah...So...we have no argument from Foseti arguing yet as to why manufacturing should be considered special...
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1) From the viewpoint of a nation-state [...snark...] manufacturing jobs seem to be zero-sum [...].Completely false. From the (insane) point of view of a nation-state...what you trade in and what you trade out will balance over time. Consumers prefer buying stuff cheaper. Rich business owners prefer selling more stuff. Workers prefer having jobs. But EVERY bit of analysis I've ever heard of says: trading with folks makes more jobs, not less..and richer people, not poorer. Full win for everyone except the crony capitalists who want to make us buy their stuff.
2) Manufacturing jobs are labor and capital intensive.Manufacturing jobs are labor and/or capital intensive. The higher the price of labor, the less of it used. If you want labor-intensive jobs in rich countries, your only choice is to go with services. Manufacturing jobs are all being eaten by robots.
I’d much prefer paying slightly higher prices for good and services than paying higher taxes for welfare benefits.Massively false equivalence. 1. Trade increases jobs, not decreases. I'd rather more trade AND more jobs, than protectionist policies and less jobs.
3) Manufacturing seems to be highly path-dependent,To whatever extent this is true (significantly, given feedback systems, and learning to see), we should prefer that we keep enough robot-supervisors here in the states to keep the robot factories running. Hopefully manufacturing will soon employ as many people as agriculture...rather than almost none. Whatever the case, the stable number is obviously far less than the current number.
He skipped the national-defense argument which is theoretically justifiable...but practically suspect.
The question is: Who do you want to have jobs? Local robots, or foreign persons? Foseti apparently prefers the robots to the foreigners...God forbid they make enough money to eat.
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Actually the USA has treated agricultural jobs as special. So your line should be:
Following the policy of treating agriculture as special has led to...the US steadily losing agricultural jobs.
Which implies that his entire argument is not just misguided, but pointless.
Point, Dr. Pat.
How are US ag jobs more special than any other? I've never been a farmer there so I don't know for sure, but you do have a lot of cash-in-hand workers which would seem less special than the standard taxed job since they aren't accumulating social sec at retirement.
You could point to corn subsidies, but that supports farm owners and the set isn't the same as farm workers.
From what little I do know, I'd say the rural community as a whole has been poorly supported with schooling and public health and all rural jobs are less special in those areas than all city jobs.
If you want special farm workers you can look around me, but even here the office workers in the department of ag all get much more generous retirement benefits than the farmers do.
My guess would be that minimum wage killed farm jobs.
Well, the comparative magnitudes of manufacturing job loss due to automation versus loss due to overseas competition is a question of fact; in the long run technology dominates, but short-to-medium... I don't know.
Note the standard economic line on all this, valid as it is, isn't necessarily relevant. Yes, in a free market, if jobs go overseas, that's because there's a comparative advantage in something else. (Protectionism abroad doesn't change the logic either; in fact it exaggerates it). However, if manufacturing is being done abroad because domestic workers are claiming benefits or doing useless public-sector make-work jobs instead, then the policy as a whole really is wrong. A libertarian will say the international trade is right and the labour market distortions are wrong, but if we decide we want the welfare safety net for humanitarian reasons, we must accept the possibility that the distortions that creates might need to be corrected in other ways.
[Though even there, the exact same argument applies to service jobs replaced with automation (Peter Hitchens has written feelingly on supermarket self-checkouts), so it doesn't really change the fact that manufacturing is not special.]
You claim that trade always increases rather than decreases jobs. That's true in theory, and I think it's true in practice as well, but if so that's a coincidence. I'm pretty sure you could build a model, if you included a benefit system and/or minimum wage, in which some trade restrictions would increase jobs.
In summary, I basically agree with you, rather than Foseti, but I don't think it's quite as clear-cut as you make out.
Ag jobs in the US may be rubbish, but they are TREATED as honourable vocations that must be defended at all costs. Pop singers lead political campaigns to "keep the family farm" and tens of billions of dollars are poured into subsidies for the same purpose.
Has it worked? No. As mentioned, the farms have in fact turned into vast corporations employing seasonal minimum wage labourers. But this is my point: Having the government set out to treat a particular type of job as sacred is a pointless act. Vast amounts of money gets spent, and the end result is that technology determines how many workers are needed to produce X product at Y price.
Getting the government involved is more likely to result in giving an advantage to the sort of big, politically connected companies than to an individual family.
Europe seems to have managed (at equal or greater cost) to have kept farming at a family level, but it is not clear whether this is because Europe has more skilled bureaucrats than the USA, more skilled farmers, an even higher level of spending, different geography and hence farm types, or just corporations that are more skilled at hiding behind a facade of family farms.
(Food related turing test word: sushi)
That article about automatic checkouts made me want to go and use the auto checkouts even more than before.
So I am supposed to accept longer waits and higher prices as part of my duty to provide jobs?
My response to that extends to the horse he rode in on.
While some level of manufacturing infrastructure has been lost, the US manufacturing output is increasing! So it's not like you're losing state of the art tech to China. You are just dumping the crap jobs.
Of course a lot of people in the US can't do anything but crap jobs, so they're screwed.
Why people care so much about them beats me.
Dr Pat, farm ownership is different to ag jobs. The number of ag workers has always been way greater than the number of farms. You start talking about ag jobs then switch to give examples about farm ownership.
I can't fault your thinking on the consequence of govt intervention on farm ownership, but that doesn't apply to ag jobs. Big farm corporations love it when people push farm subsidies on the idea of saving the family farm. If you equate ag jobs with farm ownership you are falling into the same kind of trap.
Farms get larger in Europe, too. Subsidies still favor large farms with the biggest recipient of cash being Tate and Lyle, the giant British sugar company. More subsidies makes Tate and Lyle richer, although the government does search for ways to seem to help family farms more. I'm not sure how effective that is.
The problem is that the effort to deal with euro subsidies is significant and, as always, involves personal relations with the several departments (DDE/DDT, chambre d'ag, ADASEA, SAFER in France). Big players have a huge advantage here, which _is_ in line with your thinking.
Ag workers have it pretty good here, due to the minimum wage laws, retirement benefits and universal health care but the consequence of those laws is that farm workers are way expensive and few get hired by anyone except the big farms. That's closer to the position that ag jobs have suffered because they are treated like every other job, not because they are treated as special.
The big string in the bow of family farms is that you can get around minimum wage laws.
Trade theory posits that trade will create more wealth. It makes no statement about who within a nation benefits from that wealth or how many jobs that wealth results in.
Also, I would caution that trade can sometimes result in capital depletion to fuel consumption, or change the allocation of capital within a nation in a way that may not benefit the majority.
I would caution that trade can sometimes result in capital depletion to fuel consumption,
I've mentioned previously that the best argument I've seen for restrictions on trade* is that there are areas of the community who will focus on short term consumption and not invest for the future. By doing things like taxing their consumption (imports of cheap consumer goods) and diverting their expenditure towards investment (purchase more expensive locally produced consumer goods, leading to investment in local factories, building up all those "economy of scale" and "path dependent" local industries) then long term growth is enhanced.
*Not that I've seen anyone actually articulate this concisely.
Of course, once you put it like that, then it becomes obvious that rather than a blunt, indirect method like tariffs, something more directed and precise, like tax deductions for investment in capital goods, would be a far more efficient approach.
Though the more efficient approach would be less amenable to rent seeking. Which may be why the more concise argument is never made, and people rely on the indirect arguments that are supported by the instinctual understanding that the population has of the concise case.
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